PRESS RELEASE: ZTE Corporation and China Mobile have recently launched the first Computing-aware Traffic Steering (CATS) router at the booth of China Mobile during MWC Barcelona 2024.
CATS router introduces computing factors into the network to achieve joint traffic steering of computing and network. This innovative approach enhances the overall performance and processing capacity of the computing and network system, resulting in a significant reduction in end-to-end latency for services. It is applicable to latency and computationally sensitive services and large-scale AI inference services.
Data, algorithms, and computing power have emerged as pivotal economic elements in the digital economy era. The new information infrastructure based on computing-network convergence provides common Internet services for the entire society, which not only facilitates service innovation, but also reduces service deployment costs, while improving the resource utilization, thereby boosting the development of digital economy. At present, the cloud, edge, terminal, and network ecosystems are relatively independent in the network architecture, and the scheduling of cloud resources like computing and storage resources and the scheduling of network resources are also isolated from each other. Consequently, there exists a temporal and spatial misalignment in planning multi-dimensional computing and network resources, leading to inefficient resource utilization.
Addressing the aforementioned challenges, China Mobile, in collaboration with ZTE and other vendors, has been committed to the research on computing power networks, and launched the CATS router tailored to meet the latest demands for joint traffic steering of computing and network. This innovative product supports routing and addressing based on computing service identities, on-path discovery of ultra-low-latency services, and hierarchical traffic steering. Specifically designed for computing-sensitive services, the CATS router can significantly improve the service experience. Through its real-time intelligent balancing mechanism, the router achieves a remarkable improvement, increasing the overall utilization rate of multi-edge computing sites by over 30%.
Since 2021, ZTE has been engaged in a partnership with China Mobile, focusing on extensive technical research and standards promotion for CATS, as well as the continuous development and testing of equipment systems. Over the course of three consecutive years, this collaborative effort has successfully met and exceeded the anticipated test objectives, particularly in key functions, like performance benchmarks, and typical application scenarios of centralized CATS solutions.
Moving forward, ZTE remains committed to ongoing innovation in CATS technology, and working with China Mobile to drive the evolution of new digital infrastructure for computing-network convergence, empower more innovative services and applications, and create a dynamic and robust ecosystem for the digital industry.